Cooking with Sotol

In this thread I will share my experiments in cooking with one of my favorite native plants of Texas, the Sotol, Dasylirion texanum. This is a beautiful and tough plant which was one of the main staple carbohydrates of the native folks here.



Today I collected a bunch of them:



The edible part is a bulblike stem at the base:



The native folks would have just buried the whole nasty dirty stem in a pit of coals and let it cook overnight, but I cleaned mine. As with artichokes, you're left with a lot of inedible bits and a tiny nugget of food. I'll probably need to peel these more:



I'm going to put these in the slow cooker tomorrow and then try to figure out a way to make them tasty. Just cooked plain they have a bland plant-like flavor. I'm wondering if some kind of marinade might help.

More about this experiment tomorrow!

I'm slow-cooking these until they seem tender, then I plan to marinate them, like marinated artichoke hearts:

I ended up cutting off more of the top of the Sotol hearts, keeping the more tender portion. I think in future I'll cut off all but this part, and cook them less. I made up a basic marinade for artichoke hearts (recipes online), and am now letting the hearts marinate in the fridge for 24 hrs.

Here they are in a pickle jar:

In the jar they even look like artichokes. I thought you used these for making liquor. The plant looks like yucca, that I have plenty of in my yard. Yucca root can be used like potatoes. Love yucca chips. Are they related?

Sotol is indeed used to make a distilled liquor, like Agave is. Yucca, for instance our native Yucca filamentosa and Yucca rupicola, do not have edible roots - they contain too much saponin to eat, but can be used for soap. The other plant called Yucca or Yuca, which is sometimes in the store, is actually Cassava (tapioca).

I learn something new every day. Interesting.

We tried the marinated hearts and my husband said they taste "like dirty pickles." So they get the designation: Yucky.

Tyler Ludens wrote:We tried the marinated hearts and my husband said they taste "like dirty pickles." So they get the designation: Yucky.

The native folks would have just buried the whole nasty dirty stem in a pit of coals and let it cook overnight ...

Hi Tyler,

This is just a wild guess, but I'm wondering if the fire pit method unlocks the tastiness of sotol. I'd take a cue from traditional cooking here and try oven roasting them next time to see if it improves the flavor quality.

Interesting nonetheless.